When I wrote my post on Webnut Welfare yesterday, I did not realize that author Matt Stoller had the answer staring him in the face.
UPDATE: MyDD has begun taking baby steps in the direction I suggest below.
But Stoller’s MyDD co-host, Chris Bowers (left), (Jerome Armstrong is the third member of that trio) estimates that members of Moveon.org, the largest Netroots political organization, contributed as much as $300 million during the last election cycle. He quotes a study from the Center for Public Integrity indicating that most of that money went to consultants, specifically consultants with contempt for the netroots.
This is not the only sign of Netroots disquiet. Markos Moulitsas calls Hillary Clinton’s claim of Netroots support a sham, concluding "her campaign has taken to misrepresenting online sentiment for the benefit of
traditional media reporters who don’t know any better."
This is the perfect time in the electoral cycle for such a discussion. Despite the bleatings of cable news, the campaign has barely started. Sorting out now who should profit from activism created in the Netroots is a discussion well worth having, before members of this group find themselves digging deep for another two years to support what they consider their enemies within the party.
Not everyone agrees, but this particular dissenter, Oliver Willis, is a Washingtonian through-and-through, complete with girth, a taste for thin women, and a rabid love for the Washington Redskins.
But Willis is far from alone. Max Sawicky calls Netroots activists suckers. "The "Internet Left" is a mostly brainless vacuum cleaner of donations for the Democratic Party," he writes, comparing them with the McGovern wing of the party in the late 1960s.
It should surprise no one Sawicky makes the same error that journalists and conservatives make, conflating the present Netroots movement with events that happened nearly 40 years ago, at the dawn of the present political era, and before most members of that movement were even born.
The fact is that, during every past crisis, the political opposition represented a rising force — movement conservatives in the 60s, liberals in the 30s, populists and progressives in the 1890s, abolitionists and businessmen in the 1850s. Yet in each one of those eras, the dominant voice being heard in the councils of power was that the rising movement was illegitimate, and somehow tied to mistakes by the previous political generation — Hooverism in the case of Nixon, Populism in the case of Roosevelt, Confederacy in the case of populism, Jacksonian Democracy in the case of Republicanism. It’s the fact that this mistake is so common throughout history that gives the rising movement intellectual space in which to find new solutions, because they’re not being attacked for what they are but for what someone else was.
But back to cases.
MyDD’s point is well-taken, but right now the choice lies with the people with whom I opened this post, Moveon.org. While they were born on the Net, and while they make extensive use of the Net in their fund-raising appeals, they are in an amalgam of old politics and new. They’re a lot more like Richard Viguerie (above) than they are like Markos Moulitsas. At the end of the day they have always practiced a sort of top-down politics, based on mass-media tested messaging, the funds mainly thrown back into TV.
This needs to change. Power follows money and if the Internet keeps subsidizing TV politics that’s all we’ll have.
If Moveon won’t move firmly into the 21st century, deploying more of their resources into building a strong Internet-based open source political movement, then those in the Netroots need to cut them loose, and start drinking their own Koolaid. In other words, start extensive fund-raising to give the Netroots institutional heft, and create a think tank for the 21st century.
Such a think tank would be horizontal. It would start with a membership organization similar to the right’s Media Bloggers Association, but it would do a lot more fund-raising, both online and off, with the aim of subsidizing the work of bloggers who need subsidizing, paying for important research that can be disseminated to Washington decision-makers, and for the things BlogPac did in the 2006 cycle.
If Moveon’s members did give $300 million in the last cycle, as Bowers claims, there’s plenty of money with which to build some sizable institutions.
For the Netroots to become a permanent part of our political discourse, it needs to engage in permanent political revolution.
